Hillary Clinton’s Beijing Speech on Women Resonates 20 Years Later

Just days after Hillary Rodham Clinton left her post as secretary of state in early 2013, she assembled a group of longtime female aides to discuss what she wanted to do as she contemplated another presidential run.

She told them she wanted to address issues affecting women and girls while at the Clinton Foundation. But Mrs. Clinton also wanted to make sure that her efforts were rooted around an important moment of her own career: the speech she delivered on Sept. 5, 1995, in a suburb of Beijing, focusing on women’s rights issues.

That speech, delivered before Mrs. Clinton had established her own political identity, has in the last two decades served as a thread she has continued to reference throughout her career. Now, on the 20th anniversary of the speech, the Beijing address has emerged as a focal point of Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign and a reminder of her advocacy for women in the midst of an ongoing controversy over her use of private email.

“Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights,” Mrs. Clinton, then 47, said in the cavernous conference hall that hosted the United Nations Fourth World Congress on Women.

On Friday, in addition to answering extensive questions about her use of a private email server as secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton discussed the Beijing speech with MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell, who covered the 1995 conference. (“We were just kids.” Ms. Mitchell said.) On Saturday, Mrs. Clinton will commemorate the anniversary of the speech at a rally in New Hampshire focused on women’s issues.

Mrs. Clinton told Ms. Mitchell that two decades after the address women and girls had made progress in health and education, but that they still lagged in political rights and security. “It’s a glass-half-filled kind of scenario,” she said.

In interviews with a dozen aides involved in the planning of the Beijing speech, a portrait emerged of a first lady who seized on the opportunity to advance the central cause of her career, but who also saw the provocative speech as a way to shape her own identity apart from that of her husband’s.

In planning the speech, Mrs. Clinton’s clashed with White House aides who thought a first lady should not dive into delicate diplomatic issues. Mr. Clinton read the speech in its early stages, but his advisers did not. The White House chief of staff, Thomas F. McLarty, told the curious press corps that Mrs. Clinton would not break any new ground in her trip to Beijing.

“Before I went there was a lot of handwringing and concern in the Congress as well as in the administration, but I made it clear that I was going to go,” Mrs. Clinton said in the interview on Friday.

Factions at the National Security Agency and State Department also pushed back at her trip, fearing Mrs. Clinton’s presence would upset the Chinese. (It did.) And some human rights activists worried her mere presence would be seen as a conciliatory sign to a hostile regime.

At the time, the Chinese government had arrested the Chinese-American activist Harry Wu for documenting human rights violations, and Mrs. Clinton would not be permitted to attend the conference if the government did not release Mr. Wu. (In the first lady’s offices in the East Wing of the White House, Mrs. Clinton’s aides started saying, “Wu is me.”) Mr. Wu was eventually released, clearing that roadblock.

“There probably wasn’t a day that wasn’t fraught with some kind of challenge that needed to be overcome,” said Melanne Verveer, who served as chief of staff to Mrs. Clinton in the White House.

Mrs. Clinton’s image had already taken a hit in her failed efforts to overhaul health care, and conservatives accused her of advancing a “radical feminist agenda” in Beijing. Catholic groups called the gathering of 1,500 delegates from around the world an “antifamily” rally.

“It wasn’t an easy situation,” said Timothy E. Wirth, a former Democratic senator from Colorado, who helped with the diplomatic logistics of the conference.

“They’d just come off health care and people were looking at her like, ‘Who is this and what is she doing?’ ” Mr. Wirth added.

Aides who traveled with Mrs. Clinton to Beijing remember the staid United Nations delegates pounding their feet as she declared “it is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food or drowned” simply because they are born female, and “it is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution.”

After the speech, women dressed in traditional garb from various nations poured over an escalator to try to touch Mrs. Clinton, who wore a powder pink suit. Tens of thousands of workers with nongovernmental organizations who were not allowed to attend the conference, gathered amid a downpour and the heavy security in Huairou, 30 miles outside Beijing, to hear Mrs. Clinton deliver a version of the speech.

“To this day, people will introduce themselves saying, ‘I was in Beijing,’ ” said Ms. Verveer, who served as the ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues at the State Department under Mrs. Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton and her strategists have certainly done their part to keep the imagery of Beijing in the public eye ever since.

At a Clinton Foundation event in New York before her April presidential announcement, Mrs. Clinton called the Beijing conference “historic and transformational.” The erupting controversy over her emails deflected attention from Mrs. Clinton’s effort last spring to highlight the speech when a United Nations conference on women’s issues turned into a tense encounter with the news media about the emails.

White House documents released last year revealed that Mrs. Clinton and her advisers early on saw the speech as an opportunity to promote her politically. The media strategy included appearances on “Good Morning America” and “Regis and Kathy Lee,” and a “listening tour” with women across the country.

“Not only would this serve as a way to immediately bring your trip to Beijing back home, but it will also give fresh domestic b-roll footage to tie in with the footage from Beijing,” Lisa Caputo, Mrs. Clinton’s press secretary, wrote in an Aug. 30, 1995 memo.

A year after the speech, the East Wing planned a “Beijing: One Year Later” event in the United States that connected Mrs. Clinton to women nationwide via satellite.

Even as Mrs. Clinton has sought to commemorate the Beijing speech as a defining moment for her, Republicans have sought to diminish it. “She made one statement in Beijing that wasn’t very profound — that women are human beings,” said Bruce Fein, a lawyer and supporter of Senator Rand Paul.

Twenty years later, Mrs. Clinton is often criticized as risk averse, whether it’s in her positioning on Wall Street regulation or international trade deals. (Aides said Mrs. Clinton learned from her years as first lady that being a firebrand isn’t always the best way to reach a mass audience.)

On Friday, Mrs. Clinton said her 2016 candidacy had grown out of the activist who presented a 12-part plan to advance the cause of women two decades ago in Beijing.

“My running for president is a way of sending a message — we have an opportunity to lift everyone,” she said.